Art Design
#Mexico #railway #trains #travel
Modern Ruins: An Artist’s Vehicle Designed to Traverse 9,000 Kilometers of Abandoned Railways in Mexico
All images courtesy the artists and the Arts Catalyst
What do you do with the abandoned railways that once held the promise of trans-continental linkage and progress? Some have converted them into tourist-friendly pathways. But Mexican artists and brothers Ivan Puig and Andrés Padilla Domene decided to traverse the nearly 9,000 km of railway in Mexico and Ecuador that, in 1995, was abandoned and left to decay. But they didn’t travel in any old fashion. In a project that ran from 2010 to 2012 the artists rode in a striking silver road-rail vehicle called SEFT-1, which they designed and built themselves so as to travel both on rail and road.
The multi-year journey explored abandoned rail but also the notion of modern ruins, and “how the ideology of progress is imprinted onto historic landscapes.”
#Mexico #railway #trains #travel
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